Margaret Munro's Loch Ness Monster on land, Borlum Bay (1934)

By the summer of 1934, a handful of Loch Ness Monster reports described something stranger than a shape in the water. An animal on land. George Spicer and his wife saw one cross the Dores to Foyers road in July 1933. Arthur Grant, a motorcyclist, reported a night sighting near Abriachan in January 1934.

Just east of Fort Augustus, at the south-western end of the loch, stood Kilchumein Lodge. Its windows looked over Borlum Bay. Margaret Munro worked there as a young housemaid for the Pimleys. Mr Pimley taught French at Fort Augustus Abbey School. Margaret was a Fort Augustus native, the daughter of Dan the Miller, and she had not been in the job long.

Sunday, 3 June 1934. About 6:30 in the morning. Margaret was looking out of a window when she saw it on the shore of the bay. It was, as she put it, the biggest animal she had ever seen in her life.

She took up binoculars. The creature lay almost, but not entirely, clear of the water. It had a "giraffe-like neck and absurdly small head out of all proportion to the great dark-grey body". Its skin was "like an elephant". Two very short fore-legs or flippers were clearly seen. The animal kept turning itself in the sunshine. At times it arched its back into one or more humps.

She watched for about twenty-five minutes. Then "it lowered its head, quietly entered the water and disappeared".

Later that morning the Pimleys walked down to the beach. They found the shingle indented, as if something of considerable size had been lying there. One account describes a slight impression on the heavy shingle, with a small branch pressed into the gravel at its centre. No casts or samples were taken.

On 5 June the story ran in the Inverness Courier and The Scotsman. The Scotsman's correspondent drew a sketch from her description, and one source says she approved it. That same day Dom Cyril Dieckhoff, a monk at Fort Augustus Abbey, wrote her account into his diary. Constance Whyte first published that entry in 1957, in More Than a Legend.

There was no official inquiry. The case has been worked over on the ground instead. Nicholas Witchell, in The Loch Ness Story in 1974, placed the animal about 200 metres from the lodge. The Loch Ness Mystery blog returned to the beach in 2013, 2019 and 2025 and argued for the mouth of the Allt na Dubhair stream, about 650 metres away, where the beach widens. The accounts differ on distance too. Dieckhoff gives 300 yards. Another version gives about 200 yards and about 20 minutes. The lodge itself has since been demolished.

Adrian Shine has reportedly favoured a seal. In 2025 a commenter set the Munro sketch beside a seal thermoregulating on a sand bar at the Beauly Firth. Defenders of the sighting reply that grey and harbour seals reach only about six or seven feet, too small for the biggest animal she had ever seen, and that seals have no long neck and cannot arch into humps. Steuart Campbell filed the case under otters. No specific hoax allegation has surfaced, and supporters note that Dieckhoff's diary records the same account independently of the press.

In 1936 a Scottish Film Productions newsreel showed a map of three land sightings, with Munro's among them. It remains one of the classic encounters with Nessie out of the water. A long watch. In daylight. Through binoculars. And never explained.